An active research for improving a home network technology is conducted by many organizations for industry standardization such as digital living network alliance (DNLA), home audio-video interoperability (HAVi), or universal plug and play (UPnP).
In a home network, a remote user interface (RUI) technology can be used in order to enable a device to control a function of another device. To simply explain, the RUI technology, which is based on a client-server architecture, is a technology that enables an RUI client to fetch an UI from a RUI server (remote user interface server, RUIS) so that a user can control the RUI server from the RUI client (remote user interface client, RUIC) through the UI.
In such a conventional approach, a control UI that can control a content (RUI) that is being rendered at the RUIC can be received only when requested by the user through a third party RUIC and a control UI that is appropriate for a corresponding content screen of a content being rendered at the RUIC at a particular time point cannot be received from the RUIC to the third party RUIC without a user request, and also, the conventional approach is disadvantageous in that the user needs to manually locate a control UI appropriate for controlling a content screen currently being rendered and send a request to the RUIC and, when the requested control UI is rendered on the third party RUIC, information about a control UI previously rendered is disappeared.